Heart Rate Zones

Heart rate zones divide the range between your resting and your maximum heart rate into bands, usually five, each standing for a different kind of effort. Zone one is a walk, zone two is a pace you could hold while talking, and zone five is an effort you can hold for a few minutes at most.

They exist because duration alone says very little. Two hours in zone two and two hours in zone four are completely different sessions with completely different costs, and a plan that counts only hours cannot tell them apart. Most endurance programs are built on spending a large majority of the time in the lower zones and a small, deliberate amount in the top ones.

Where the boundaries sit is the part people get wrong. The common shortcut of 220 minus your age is a population average with a standard deviation of about twelve beats, so for a specific person it is often out by enough to put a whole zone in the wrong place. A measured maximum, or zones set from a lactate threshold test, is far better.

What it is not

The zone numbers are not a difficulty rating you should try to maximize. More time in the high zones is not better training, and for most people it is how overtraining starts. Zones are a way of distributing effort deliberately, not a score to run up.

Where you see it in FitnessSyncer

Set your zones in your preferences and every activity that arrives with heart rate data is broken down by time in each one, visible on the activity itself, on your Dashboard and in the Daily Analyzer.